The 14th edition of Frieze London will take place a week earlier this year, open­ing 6–9 October with a Preview Day on Wednesday 5 October. This year’s fair brings together more than 160 of the world’s leading galleries, showcasing today’s most significant artists across its main and curated sections, alongside the fair’s celebrated non-profit programme of ambitious new artist commissions and talks. In 2016 the fair will debut a new gallery section, The Nineties, recreating seminal exhibitions from the decade, alongside the return of sections Focus and Live, the definitive platforms for emerging galleries and performance art respec­tively. Frieze London coincides with Frieze Masters and the Frieze Sculpture Park, convening art of the highest quality from a spectrum of periods and coun­tries and offering collectors, scholars and art enthusiasts an unparalleled cultural experience.

Building on Frieze’s enduring relationship with collecting institutions, this year, the fair partners with two acquisition funds for national museums, including the the Frieze Tate Fund, now supported by WME | IMG; and the launch of the Contemporary Art Society’s Collections Fund at Frieze, supporting a regional museum in the UK.

Victoria Siddall, Director, Frieze Fairs said, ‘Frieze has become known for its strong curated sections and this year I am particularly excited to see Nicolas Trembley’s selection of artists who changed the conversation in the 1990s. This adds to the great range and diversity of work shown throughout the fair by the world’s leading galleries. I am also thrilled that we will have two official museum acquisition funds at the fair this year, including the Frieze Tate Fund - this was used to purchase Tate’s first-ever performance work at Frieze Art Fair 2004, Ro­man Ondák’s Queue, which was shown for the recent opening of the new exten­sion. In the fair’s non-profit programme, Raphael Gygax will give a new per­spective on Frieze Projects, contributing to the many elements which will make this an unmissable week.’

Institutions at the Fair: Tate, Contemporary Art Society & Allied Editions

This year sees the realization of two acquisition funds for national museums, in­cluding the return of the Frieze Tate Fund, this year supported by WME | IMG.

• Established in 2003 as the first acquisition fund connected to an art fair, the 2016 Frieze Tate Fund will provide £150,000 for Tate to acquire works of art at Frieze London this October. To date, Tate has acquired 100 works at Frieze London, with 12 major pieces currently on view at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. The Tate acquisition will be announced on Thursday 6 October
•   In addition, Frieze welcomes the Contemporary Art Society as a new partner, making possible the acquisition of a major new work for a selected regional museum. The Collections Fund at Frieze currently stands at £50,000, including a match-funded gift, which was awarded to Middles­brough Institute of Modern Art after a competitive application process open to the Contemporary Art Society’s 70 Museum Members across the UK. The acquisition will be announced on Wednesday 5 October, at 3pm in the Reading Room at Frieze London
•   Allied Editions will also return to the fair with an increased presence and guest regional partner Nottingham Contemporary. Over five years of col­laboration with Frieze London, Allied Editions has raised over £500,000 in unrestricted funds to benefit its partner organisations

A New Section: The Nineties Selected by Geneva-based curator Nicolas Trembley, galleries will revisit seminal exhibitions from the 1990s, highlighting key collaborations between dealers and artists that have had a lasting impact on contemporary art. Follow­ing significant institutional attention to this decade – from the New Museum’s 2013 exhibition ‘NYC 1993’ to the group show ‘Récit d’un temps court’ currently on view at Mamco (Geneva) – this ambitious section will recreate critical mo­ments that first took place in galleries across London, Paris, Cologne and New York. The Nineties features galleries that are both new to the fair and presented within the main section, as well as era-defining spaces that no longer exist.

 Solo presentations include:

• Wolfgang Tillmans’s very first exhibition at Daniel Buchholz’s gallery in 1993, then located in his father’s Cologne bookshop;
• Anthony Reynold’s 1996 gallery debut of Richard Billingham’s iconic series of photographs ‘Ray’s a Laugh’, which brought the artist to notoriety (and was later included in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997);
• Esther Schipper (Berlin) will recreate Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s iconic room installation R.W.F. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) from 1992; and
•  Neu Gallery (Berlin) will bring together important works by Daniel Pflumm, a central figure of 1990s Berlin, collapsing boundaries between art, electronic music production and nightlife Iconic shows to be revisited include: Aperto ’93 - the exhibition at the Venice Biennale conceived by Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, which introduced a generation of artists to the global stage including Maurizio Cattelan, Carsten Höller and Rikrit Tiravanija. (Massimo De Carlo gallery, Milan); and
•  Christian Nagel’s 1992 group exhibition ‘Wohnzimmer / Büro’ (Living room / office), including the original wallpaper designed by Jörg Schlick (Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin).

The World’s Leading Contemporary Galleries

Frieze London 2016 draws together 119 galleries to present ambitious solo and themed exhibitions across its main section, with new additions for 2016 includ­ing Miguel Abreu, Matthew Marks Gallery and Metro Pictures (all New York).

Highlight presentations will include

•   An immersive light installation by James Turrell with Kayne Griffin Cor­coran (Los Angeles), who will take part in Frieze London for the first time;
• Philippe Parreno’s new sculptural work (Pilar Corrias Gallery, London), conceived in conjunction with the artist’s commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall; and
• ‘L’atelier d’artistes’: Hauser & Wirth’s exploration of the uncanny in reconstructing artist studios, revealing the tendency towards creative license. Monographic and group presentations by major female artists can also be seen across the main section, including:
•  Goshka Macuga (Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich);
• Latifa Echakch (kamel mennour, Paris);
• Francis Upritchard (Kate MacGarry, London);
•  Penny Siopis (Stevenson, Cape Town);
• Channa Horwitz with Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles) which moves into the main section from Focus;
• The Third Line (Dubai) will bring together works by iconic and emerging artists Sophia Al Maria, Rana Begum, Monir Shahroudy Farman­farmaian and Huda Lutfi; and
• P.P.O.W (New York) will present four generations of feminism with Car­olee Schneemann, Betty Tompkins, Portia Munson, Aurel Schmidt and Erin Riley, featuring Munson’s seminal work Pink Project (1993)

Live: performance and participation Advised by museum curators Jacob Proctor (Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago) and Fabian Schöneich (Portikus, Frank­furt), the pioneering section for performance and participatory art returns, with new and historical projects presented in a dedicated space within the fair:

Highlights include:

•  The international premiere of Para um corpo..., from the series ‘Hábito/ Habitante’ by Martha Araújo (Galeria Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo & PM8, Vigo), bringing to light the significance of performance art in Latin America under military dictatorship; and
•  In the first installation of its kind at the fair, the groundbreaking Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim, who has been deaf since birth, will ex­plore the materiality of sound through performance, opening up new fields of perception to hearing and non-hearing audiences alike (with Carroll/ Fletcher, London).

Focus: emerging talents

Also advised by Jacob Proctor and Fabian Schöneich, Focus is the definitive destination to discover emerging talents from Berlin to Shanghai, featuring 37 galleries under 12 years of age. A wave of new-generation London galleries join Focus for the first time this year, including:

• Chewday’s showing Gabriele Beverage alongside idols from the Neolithic period (10,000 – 2000 BC);
•  Arcadia Missa showing London-based artists Jesse Darling, Dean Blunt, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings;
• Seventeen, with an immersive virtual reality project by Jon Rafman; and
•  Southard Reid showing an all-over painting installation by Celia Hemp-ton. Taiwan and Guatemala will be represented at Frieze London for the first time:
• Newcomers Chi-Wen Gallery will present video work by Yin-Ju Chen;
•  and Proyectos Ultravioleta will show new painting and collage by  Elisa­beth Wild and Vivian Suter

 The section will also build on strong representations from the emerging scenes in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Shanghai and Berlin, offering a platform for ambitious work by Liu Chuang (Magician Space, Beijing), Aaron Garber-Maikovska (High Art, Paris) and Liz Magic Laser (Various Small Fires, New York).

Frieze Sculpture Park

The Sculpture Park will be open from 5 October 2016 – 8 January 2017, with free entry to all. Selected by Clare Lilley (Director of Programme, York-shire Sculpture Park), 20 works by 20th-century masters and contemporary talents will be placed throughout the English Gardens of The Regent’s Park, creating a free outdoor exhibition at the centre of London.

For the first time, Art Fund is the programming partner for the Sculpture Park, presenting workshops for the duration of the three-month exhibition as well as the new-look Frieze Sculpture Guide App, available to download from 5 October.

Featuring works presented by galleries participating in Frieze London and Frieze Masters, contemporary highlights include:

• Optic Cloak by Conrad Shawcross, a six-metre-high study for his major 2016 commission for the Greenwich Peninsula (Victoria Miro, London)
• New monumental bronzes including Neptune/Rescue (2016) by Matthew Monahan, recently on view at the National Roman Museum in Palazzo Altempts (Massimo De Carlo, Milan); Treat (2016), an amorphous sculp­ture by Nairy Baghramian, winner of the 2016 Zurich Art Prize; and International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 11, Last Man, a key element from Goshka Macuga’s celebrated exhibition at Fondazi­one Prada, Milan.
•  Frieze Talks Curated by Christy Lange (Frieze) with Gregor Muir (Executive Director, ICA, London and incoming Director of Collection, International Art, Tate), Frieze Talks will bring together today’s most influential artists, writers, curators and thinkers.
•   For the first time, Frieze Talks presents a special daily series focusing on a single, urgent theme – ‘Borderlands’ – with contributions from Fatima Al Qadiri, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Hannah Black, Josh Kline, Jill Magid and Ben Rivers, among many others.;
•   In addition, lively and intimate conversations with leading cultural figures will include a keynote lecture by the legendary Jamaican dub musician and producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry; and a special discussion inspired by the 25th anniversary of frieze magazine, with Julia Peyton-Jones, Adrian Searle, Wolfgang Tillmans and Jane and Louise Wilson.

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